(Credits: Far Out / Cash Box / Columbia)
Sun 24 August 2025 2:00, UK
Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna once said she wished Kurt Cobain could have lived to see the impact he had beyond the 1990s, and it’s hard not to feel the same way about Janis Joplin, who barely saw a fraction of her own significance before she succumbed to the infamous ’27 Club’ in 1970.
That’s not to say that Joplin didn’t have countless breakthrough moments during the brief time she scrambled her way to the top. There were many, like her performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, or at Woodstock in 1968, or more generally across album successes, like Cheap Thrills. Or, perhaps most obviously, how she was basically the first-ever female rockstar, who essentially created an entirely new rulebook for women in music, or, at the very least, got rid of the old one and left ashes in its wake.
Just before she died, Joplin had been recording the album that would be released posthumously, Pearl. But a couple of months before that, she was also oblivious to the fact that she’d also performed her very last show. On August 12th, 1970, equipped with Full Tilt Boogie Band at Harvard Stadium in Boston, Joplin performed for the last time, with around 40,000 people none the wiser to the fleeting magic they were witnessing before their very eyes.
That’s also probably due to the fact that, in true Joplin fashion, the show was something of a disaster. Obviously, we can look at it now and feel the poignancy that undercuts the whole thing. But at the time the mess of her last show was defined by stolen equipment and an uneasiness that meant the audience had to be reassured that Joplin was, in fact, present. She was just waiting for a solution to the problem, hiding beneath the stage while they scrambled to find something, anything, to make the show work.
What did Janis Joplin play at her final concert?
Recalling the whole conundrum, Kevin McElroy later said, “Oddly, while we were sitting there, and the crowd was getting into something, it became very smoky and sweet there, let’s put it that way, we could see, straight ahead, the open-scaffolding stage. Janis was underneath. And she had a bottle of Southern Comfort, and she was just in a world of her own there.”
He continued of the mesmerising scene, “She just was doing what she wanted to do in the moment. After another hour-and-a-half or so, it was really quite a delay, she literally burst onto the stage. It was just electric”.
As such, all of the mishaps swiftly became water under the bridge. Because the moment Joplin finally got on stage, all else was forgotten. A star in the peak of her shine, she delivered a masterclass in resilience and sheer artistry, with an eight-track mix of some of her best tunes and a couple of covers, like Garnet Mimms’ ‘My Baby’ and George Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’. She also delivered an unforgettable rendition of her very own ‘Mercedes Benz’ and ‘That’s Rock ‘n’ Roll’.
The whole time, she maintained her signature edge, the one that proved she couldn’t be phased by anything, not even theft or touring malfunctions. Because she likely knew that, no matter what, her audience would be waiting, and they were for the fortuitous show it was.
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